The Disk Selection Screen now provides an installation option to encrypt the disks in the ZFS pool using GELI. This option requires the BIOS to understand GPT partitioning.

The ability to import an existing ZFS pool has been added to the System Utilities menu of the text-based installer.

Package Manager and Update Center have been removed from Control Panel as this functionality is now provided in AppCafe®. pc-metapkgmanager has also been removed as packages can be managed using either AppCafe® or pkg.

The ability to choose between PRODUCTION and EDGE package sets has been moved from the Misc tab of System Manager to the Configure menu of AppCafe®.

Many new features have been added to AppCafe®, including the ability to manage PBIs, packages, and meta-packages in one interface. The information about a highlighted PBI includes screenshots, available plugins, similar applications, and a list of the build options that were used for building the PBI. Each PBI has a user rating and an associated wiki page where users can add their own rating and user tips.

The pbi_addrepo, pbi_autobuild, pbi_browser, pbi_create, pbi_deleterepo, pbi_indextool, pbi_listrepo, pbi_makepatch, pbi_makeport, pbi_makerepo, pbi_metatool, pbi_patch, pbi_update, pbi_update_hashdir, and pbid commands are now deprecated and have been removed, along with their associated man pages.

The pbi_update_makeindex and pbi_updateindex commands have been added to PBI Manager.

EasyPBI2 has been updated to version 2.4.1. This version converts pkgNG packages to the new PBIng format. A new Bulk Module Creator has been added which allows the user to automatically build a PBI module for every package in a category, making it easier to create a custom PBI repository.

Boot Manager now has a "Maximum auto-generated boot environments" setting with a default value of 5. Once the configured maximum number of boot environments is reached, PC-BSD® will automatically prune (delete) the oldest automatically created boot environment. However, it will not delete any boot environments you create manually.

Login Manager has two new options. One can be used to configure the login time delay and the other to force the login user to type in their username.

PC-BSD® now provides full PulseAudio support. The "PulseAudio Configuration" and "PulseAudio Mixer" utilities have been added to Control Panel. In addition, system tray now contains pc-mixer which provides a front-end to mixer, Sound Configuration, and the two PulseAudio utilities.

Life Preserver now defaults to “Automatic” which creates a snapshot every 5 minutes, which are kept for an hour, then the hourly is kept for 24 hours, the daily is kept for a month, and the monthly is kept for a year. In addition, if the capacity of the ZFS pool falls below 75%, the oldest snapshot will be auto-pruned.